Cisco Tech Stories

14 - From spanning trees to saving trees

In this episode, Esther Roure Villa remembers her days of
troubleshooting Service Providers and spanning-tree loops. Esther is now
a Sustainability Lead at Cisco and explains to us why it's way more
technical than just a few buzzwords for good measure.

13 - Crash course : automating problem resolution with RADKit

In this episode, we host our first non-Cisco guest
Richard Atkin from ITGL. He tells us how he combines network engineering
and programming in his job role with the help of Cisco RADKit, a free
tool provided by Frederic Detienne whom we also invited on this episode !
When you have random access points crashing in your network, how can
you automate the troubleshooting and more importantly expedite a
solution ?
Find out more at radkit.cisco.com

12 - Rogue (AP) One - A Cisco TAC story

In this episode, Tiago Antunes takes remote troubleshooting to the next level where guiding someone collecting a wireless packet capture on site allows to figure out who is messing up with the warehouse Wi-Fi network.
00:00-Introduction
1:12-Tiago Antunes
1:50-Warehouse Wi-Fi shenanigans
18:40-Talking Web Summit

11 - Switching Gears: The Flicker Board Fiasco and the Intricacies of SD-Access

00:00 Introduction
02:30 Nathan flies to Malaysia
13:00 Discussing SD-access and switching
In this episode, Nathan Pan, Switching and SD-access Technical Leader, tells us about his trip onsite to Malaysia. We engage on a long discussion about Cisco SD-access as well as the evolution of switching technologies.

10- Firewalls play ”Tag ! you’re it !”

00:00 Intro
02:06 Justin Roberts
In this episode, we interview Justin Roberts, Technical Leader in Next-Gen Firewalls in the US. He takes us, in a very technical episode, through the artchitecture of Cisco Firewalls, how they work and how performance and security are two concepts that are very related. In this story, a customer is seeing applications performance issues after the start of Covid as employees all work from home. However, load is not the problem and their beefy security appliances should handle it without any problem. Where could the problem be ?

9 - April’s fool episode : 2 truths and a lie

00:00 Intro
00:59 Welcome
01:57 Jaro's story
16:20 Ivan's story
31:56 Rik's story
Today, we interview Jaroslaw Gawron, Ivan Shirshin and Rik Boven. They tell us their stories but one of them is made up. Will you be able to guess which one ? Between database drops, a crystal farm and a blackhole generator, hard to know ...

8 - Spotless but spot on

In this episode, Steven Janssens takes us through his most memorable Collaboration mysteries.In
one story, Steven is faced with random Webex endpoints disconnecting
with no other logs than "user disconnected session" but the user swears
they didn't disconnect. Is there a ghost involved ?The other story
involves latency troubleshooting in peak hours and load measuring. The
server should have plenty enough power but somehow is still not able to
cope with the load ?

7 - The missing chassis and Christmas Ski Chaos

Today, we host Philip Smeuninx, Principal Engineer in Collaboration technologies in CX.
He tells us stories about missed upgrades during christmas, missing ski vacations with the family as well as hunting for a lost call manager chassis in the logistics chain.

6 - Automation Pandemonium : The day SNMP broke the Datacenter

We receive our audio editor but first of all DataCenter guru Kris Vandecruys. He tells us about SAN and the storage technologies, FiberChannel, the difference between NAS and SAN as well as the time where an SNMP monitoring script killed the whole datacenter.

5 - Hacking UCS servers like an old gaming console

In this episode, Ricardo Galvan tells us about the time he had to hack into a UCS to troubleshoot it when he went onsite to a customer who had random server crashes over the period of many many months.
We also discuss the future of UCS servers and Compute in general.